Book Image

Practical System Programming for Rust Developers

By : Prabhu Eshwarla
Book Image

Practical System Programming for Rust Developers

By: Prabhu Eshwarla

Overview of this book

Modern programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, and Java have become increasingly accepted for application-level programming, but for systems programming, C and C++ are predominantly used due to the need for low-level control of system resources. Rust promises the best of both worlds: the type safety of Java, and the speed and expressiveness of C++, while also including memory safety without a garbage collector. This book is a comprehensive introduction if you’re new to Rust and systems programming and are looking to build reliable and efficient systems software without C or C++. The book takes a unique approach by starting each topic with Linux kernel concepts and APIs relevant to that topic. You’ll also explore how system resources can be controlled from Rust. As you progress, you’ll delve into advanced topics. You’ll cover network programming, focusing on aspects such as working with low-level network primitives and protocols in Rust, before going on to learn how to use and compile Rust with WebAssembly. Later chapters will take you through practical code examples and projects to help you build on your knowledge. By the end of this Rust programming book, you will be equipped with practical skills to write systems software tools, libraries, and utilities in Rust.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with System Programming in Rust
6
Section 2: Managing and Controlling System Resources in Rust
12
Section 3: Advanced Topics

Understanding the ABI

This section provides a brief introduction to the ABI and a few related (advanced) features of Rust that deal with conditional compilation options, data layout conventions, and link options.

The ABI is a set of conventions and standards that compilers and linkers adhere to, for function-calling conventions, and for specifying data layouts (type, alignment, offset).

To understand the significance of the ABI, let's draw an analogy with APIs, which are a well-known concept in application programming. When a program wants to access an external component or library at the source-code level, it looks for the definition of the API exposed by that external component. The external component can be a library or an external service accessible over the network. The API specifies the name of the functions that can be called, the parameters (along with their names and data types) that need to be passed to invoke the function, and the type of value returned from...